Kinect

Kinected Conference from Lining (Lizzie) Yao on Vimeo.


I joined a rl group about a month ago that is essentially for people trying to figure out what to do with Kinect.  Kinect is an Xbox cam addition which captures your body movements and, with some tweaking, can be made to work with other devices.  I joined this group because I had an idea about using Kinect with my arts grant.  To create a first life space in a gallery where I supply a virtual reality headset for visitors to wear and then try to use kinect to allow for the gallery visitor to move within an environment that I create.  I was thinking that to have a gallery visitor put on a headset then, then be required to use a keyboard to navigate (while not being able to see it) would be a bit of an obstacle.
     So yes I am in this group and we are made up of a few artists, a handful of programmers and some self professed nerds.  Each of them are quite accomplished in their own area of expertise.  One of them in fact is a five time Maui Tai world champion.  Last meeting some of the programmers were talking and I honestly had no idea what they were talking about whatsoever.  In fact, and this is no lie, one of them brought up a screen of gobblygook much like that green code from the Matrix movie and they were looking at it and exclaiming over parts of it.  I nodded and pretended to know what was going on, but yeah that's a different world. Kinect is fascinating and pretty much Microsoft have pretended that it was hacked with code being leaked but thats kind of strange because they export them with USB connections which seems to be a bit contrary.  Everyone has a USB connection.  So yes the world is their research and development division.  I am going to post kinect things here and there as it may well be the future of how we interact with everything from software to hardware.  I don't really know what I am talking about yet, but I will post things that I learn or come across.  For example, when you use kinect to capture your movements from the front it sometimes has problems with certain angles.  Solution is to place a second kinect behind the subject and then your full range of motion is picked up much easier.

(I really wish they didn't show second life at its most ugly state of graphics, such as in this video below, but you get the idea)